american

American popular culture, television in particular, is inundated with dramatic, popular television shows that blur the lines between good guys and bad guys. Specifically, immensely popular shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad feature male characters who are undoubtedly criminals, but they are also, in some ways, very likeable. Breaking Bad, in particular, muddies the waters of protagonists and antagonists, and keeps them muddied throughout the entire five seasons of the shows. Early in the series, the audience feels sympathy for Walter White, disdain and annoyance for Jesse Pinkman, and heartbreak for Skyler White.

International Girl Studies Association are seeking submissions for our inaugural conference which is being held at the University of East Anglia, Norwich from 7-9 April 2016. The inaugural conference seeks to bring together researchers and students working on girls and girlhood in any part of the world and in any discipline or interdisciplinary field.

Girl Studies has become one of the most dynamic academic fields, encompassing a vast array of disciplines and interdisciplinary approaches. This conference aims to bring together scholars from across the world to explore experiences of girlhood, recent developments within the field, investigating new questions and revisiting historical issues.

Session: Comparative American Ethnic Literature, November 6-8, 2015, Portland State University and Hilton Portland, Oregon Open topic: Papers comparing any ethnically/"racially" defined American literature or papers on any one of those literatures are invited. This is a standing session of the annual PAMLA conference (Pacific and Ancient Modern Language Association). Submit any proposals via the Online Submission form at pamla.org Deadline: June 10, 2015. Chair of session: Martin Japtokmjaptok@palomar.edu

Submissions are invited for the forthcoming issue of "The Apollonian" on the representations of the 'queer' in the various genres and sub-genres of literature, art, cinema, culture, critical theory, philosophy and history. The papers are expected to be scholarly in nature, and yet accessible to a fairly general readership.

This panel seeks interesting and innovative papers in the field of adaptation studies. As Linda Hutcheon writes in A Theory of Adaptation, adapters "are just as likely to want to contest the aesthetic or political values of the adapted text as to pay homage." Our panelists will explore the political uses to which adaptation is put, considering why and how authors adapt specific texts for political purposes. We will consider the possibilities and limitations of using adaptation as a political tool.

Inspired by the 50th year anniversary marking the landmark march from Selma to Montgomery, the journal Making Connections: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cultural Diversity invites submissions for a themed special issue on Race and 'Normalcy.'

"Race and 'Normalcy,'" builds on Dr. Martin Luther King's (1965) address at the conclusion of the march, in which he states:

From Langston Hughes' 1955 collaboration with photographer Roy DeCarava in The Sweet Flypaper of Life, Wallace Thurman's 1929 collaboration with William Jourdan Rapp in Harlem: A Melodrama of Negro Life in Harlem, and the infamous collaboration of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston in Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, the Harlem Renaissance era was a time of flourishing inter-arts collaborations under-examined in contemporary criticism. This panel therefore welcomes papers about the inter-arts collaborations of the Harlem Renaissance inspired by the SAMLA 87 theme, In Concert: Literature and the Other Arts.